Gradually gearing myself up for returning to my writing once my health allows (hopefully within the next few weeks), I thought I would share with you the rough first chapter of the novel I hope to return to—my first children’s book, tentatively titled Crinklewink. Please feel free to share your thoughts here, on Facebook or Twitter.

Chapter 1: The Day Crinklewink Came to Town

We weren’t expecting him. Which was understandable, I guess, given that no one had told us we should expect him. He came walking out of the setting sun—the long shadow of his long body stretching out in front of him like it was pointing at us, choosing us.

It had been one of those dead good days. You know the type, right? Summer holidays. You get up early not because you have to, but because you want to. You have absolutely no idea what you’re going to do all day but one thing you do know? No one will be telling you what to do—or, at least, not as much as they usually do. Me—my name’s Walter, by the way, Walter Peterson, but you can just call me Walter—I’d called for my friend Elsie and our other friend Diddy Duncan Vermeer by about nine thirty and by ten we were mucking about on the common at the back of my house. We played there most days. Mainly because it was good, but also because we weren’t supposed to go no further. Our dad, well, he’s not exactly all that bright. The kind of man who hits his thumb with a hammer accidentally and then does it a second time on purpose just to see if it’ll hurt as much. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good dad. Better than some I’ve seen and probably better than a fair few I haven’t. But you know what they can be like? Of course you do. Well, he reckoned that our entire estate was full of kiddie fiddlers and that if we wandered too far you could bet your bottom dollar we’d end up being abducted and … well, I won’t go on but you get the picture.

So that’s where we had been all day. At dinner time—lunchtime, if you’re posh—Mam had brought us some sandwiches and that cheap fizzy pop from the corner shop that nobody really likes but everybody drinks, even if they don’t admit it, and we had continued doing pretty much nothing that seemed like quite a lot anyway. Duncan … well, he has Downs. Right funny he is, but not in that way where you end up taking the Mickey out of him even when you don’t mean to. He just joins in and gets on with it and me and Elsie, we like him a lot, even if he does sometimes talk when he’s eating and spit food. (Yeah, I’ve done that, too, but Duncan can spit food like no one. If it was a proper Olympic event, they’d say, “Sod the Special Olympics, you, young man, are now on Team GB—here’s your food, get spitting!”) … Anyway, Duncan had been having one of his really active days. That’s what his mam calls them. Basically, he just gets like really hyper and it takes some tiring him out. He’d been dashing about on the common like a blue bummed fly (you know what I’m really saying when I say “blue bummed fly”, don’t you?) Me and Elsie had been doing our best to calm him down. Not because we were worried that he might be too wound up for his mam when he went home—we didn’t actually like her all that much so, generally speaking, we kind of liked taking Duncan home as wound up and messy as possible, just to watch her eyes pop and her ears turn red. No, we’d basically been trying to calm him down because we were both knackered.

It was getting late but it was still light, so we didn’t have to go. Not yet. We sat cross-legged like three corners of the triangle on our little patch of common, trying to keep him entertained with a new word. He struggled with some. His tongue … I don’t know, it was sort of thick, I suppose. Not thick as in stupid. Thick as in … well, thick. So sometimes certain words just wouldn’t work for him. But he really loved trying. And almost every day we, me and Elsie, we did our best to find one he hadn’t attempted before. Today it was—my choice, Elsie would never have picked this one—“testicle”.

Duncan grinned and held up a finger, pointing at the sky as if to say, Right, that makes sense, I’ve got it now! “H-h-h-effittle!”

“Maybe we should try penis,” I said to Elsie, but she didn’t seem all that impressed with this.

“Maybe we shouldn’t, Walter. Maybe we should teach him something useful instead.”

“You don’t think a pen—”

“Don’t even!” She held her hand in my face, turning away from me with her eyes closed. “I’ve told you before, Walter, dear, useful. Something interesting and not relating to …” She looked back at me and … down … waggling her fingers … “… not relating to that. Something like quadratic equations or … I know!”

“You do?”

“She does!” Duncan said. “She always does!”

“Cosmology,” Elsie told us very calmly.

“Moscology?”

I kind of got the feeling that the day was going to end in one of those evenings that went on much too long. If Elsie got talking about cosmology—she’d done it before; loads of times—it would never get dark and we’d be forced to sit there listening to her for like ever. I mean, she was dead clever and everything. Still is. But she just wouldn’t shut up once she got started. Dad would have said that she was like a long playing record—whatever one of those is when they it’s at home.

Thankfully, though, we were interrupted.

I think I’d always been waiting. Ever since I was little. Waiting for stuff to happen. That’s why I liked being outdoors so much. If something was going to happen, you could bet your life it had more of a chance of happening outside.

And it did.

You know, right, those times when you look back at stuff and think to yourself I knew something like that was going to happen!? Well, that was what this was like. The signs were everywhere: the way the sun shone that day, different in a way I couldn’t explain; the way the pop that Mam had brought us had bubbled and fizzed like it never had before; even the way Elsie’s sparkly Doc Martens caught the light—all of this told me things I just couldn’t hear at the time, things like Something’s going to happen. Someone’s coming.

Like I said earlier, he came out of the setting sun and his long shadow kind of reached out towards us. Reminded me of one of those old gangster or horror movies in black and white you see on telly sometimes—a bad guy or a vampire standing in a doorway with the light behind him or it, bleeding blackness into the room (I read that somewhere and decided to borrow it, by the way … probably best if you don’t tell anyone because Elsie said it might be something called “theft of intellectual property”, whatever that means). The three of us looked up and around in his direction. He was tall and, to begin with, difficult to make out with the sun setting behind him, but when he moved a little to one side I could see that he was about the same age as us—about ten or eleven, something like that. With jet black hair, long and greasy, and pale skin that made me think of the exercise books we wrote in at school, he should have looked unhealthy, especially when you saw how skinny he was, too. But this boy didn’t look ill or anything. In fact, something about him made me think that whoever he was he would probably live forever.

“My name is Aaron Crinklewink,” he said. “And seven days from now a woman with purple hair will try to kill me.”

Elsie’s alarm bells were ringing. I could tell. Heck, I could practically hear them. Dingdong, dingdong, dingflippingdong. She moved closer to Duncan, watching Crinklewink out of the corner of her eye. (See what I did there? Crinklewink? Eye? … Never mind …) I looked at her and she shook her head as if to say Don’t encourage him, and when I moved to her side she whispered, loud enough for Crinklewink to hear, “Another Norman Andrews.”

Yes. Norman Andrews. Or Andrew Normans, as we liked to call him. Now there is a story. Not much of a one but, well, I suppose you want to hear it anyway, yes? … You don’t? Oh, well, I won’t bother, then …

Kidding!

Norman Andrews was this kid who was at our school for a while years ago—back when we were nine. He was one of those boys who just aren’t happy unless they are bragging about something. The new laces he got for his sensible shoes. The way his mother had taught him how to use something called a slide rule (Elsie knew what this was but, to be honest, I couldn’t have cared less). Even the fact that his birth had gone on for three whole days. He always had something to tell but the best by far—the one that really peed every one off—was the story he told her about his dad.

“Father,” he would say, chin raised, every letter of the word spoken dead clear like—as if he was in one of those BBC2 films set way back where the women have their bosoms pushed up under their chins. “Father is a civil servant. Very, very high-ranking in the Inland Revenue. Has his own cubicle and paper clip supply and everything. Pushing paper all day like you wouldn’t believe. Anyone important needs any coffee making, he’s the man they come to because, you know, he can be trusted to do the job properly. That’s what they all say: ‘If you want the job doing properly, go to a man who can be trusted like Andrew Andrews!’”

He just went on and on. How his dad was the only one in the entire building who could fix the photo copier. How Andrew Andrews (stupid name alert!) regularly fixed the toilets. The time when the fabled Mr Andrews, as our teacher once called him under her breath, went out onto a ledge, four storeys up, to wipe some bird poo off the window because the tea lady told him to do it. (He nearly fell, apparently, and had to go out in his lunch break for some new underpants.)

Brag, brag, brag. That’s all we got … until the day when we discovered, I can’t quite remember how, just what his father really did.

“You’re a liar, Norman Andrews,” Elsie had said to him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Making out like your dad is something he isn’t.” Norman had tried to deny it but, well, when Elsie gets the bit between her teeth there’s no stopping her. “He can’t help it, you know. Your dad. He can’t help what he is. You should be proud of him, instead of trying to make him look better than he is.” I’m still not sure that bit came out quite as it was meant to. “It’s not his fault he isn’t a civil servant with his own cubicle. But so what? So what if he is only a high-ranking paratrooper with hundreds of missions under his belt and more medals than you can shake a really big stick at? Maybe he doesn’t come up to your standards—but, Norman, he’s your father!”

I’ll tell you, by the time she’d finished with him, Norman Andrews was a right mess, sitting in the corner of the playground blubbering like a baby. I’d almost expected him to start sucking his thumb and filling his nappy.

Funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

So, remembering Norman Andrews—but, even more, remembering what Elsie had done to him—I didn’t take the decision to ignore Elsie’s warning lightly. But still I did it.

We sat down together cross-legged, the four corners of a square, now, Native American Indians preparing for a powwow, and Crinklewink lowered his head, doing this huge sigh-thing that made me think that we were really in for something, here. I noticed his fingernails were dirty: not just your normal, everyday dirt, but real grimy digging-up-dead-bodies-by-hand kind of dirt. His hands themselves didn’t seem too bad—Duncan’s were far dirtier—but those fingernails …

“You were joking, weren’t you?” Elsie asked.

Crinklewink looked at her questioningly. “What about?”

“About that woman.”

“What woman?”

Duncan waved a finger about, as if pointing at some moving object the rest of us couldn’t see. “Purple hair,” he said, glancing at Elsie. “Woman with purple hair. Right, Else?”

“That’s right,” she said to Duncan, before turning her attention back to Crinklewink. “The woman with purple hair. You were joking about her trying to kill you in seven days’ time, right?”

Crinklewink didn’t look away from her—not right away—which was pretty impressive, I thought, because Elsie could be right intimidating when she wanted to be, especially when she looked over her specs at you, which was what she was doing now. He just stared right back at her for the longest time without speaking, and then looked at Duncan.

Our pal was doing what he sometimes did—when he wasn’t getting words wrong and spitting food for Great Britain. Mouth open, like completely focused on Crinklewink, he was dribbling down his chin a bit. I was just about to tell him that it was “time to mop up”, which was our code for “wipe your flipping chin, Duncan, mate”, when Crinklewink reached into his trouser pocket, leaning back, and pulled out a grubby hanky. Without even pausing to think about it, he reached over and very gently wiped Duncan’s chin for him. Duncan—normally not that good with strangers—was dead chuffed about this. I could tell. He grinned this really huge grin and looked at me and Elsie as if to say, “Was that cool or what?”

I glanced at Elsie. Elsie glanced at me. She seemed to approve. And then we were both looking at Crinklewink as he started talking again.

“I wasn’t joking,” he said. “One week from today she will try to kill me. I’ve known it ever since I came to town. My first day here, it was revealed to me.”

I started to ask “revealed how?”, but Elsie cut me off. “When did you come to town?” she asked.

Shrugging to make us think he didn’t consider stuff like that all that much, he said, “Ages ago. Last week.”

“And haven’t you told no one?” I wanted to know, my original question already forgotten.

“Anyone,” Elsie corrected. “Haven’t you told anyone?”

“I haven’t told anyone or no one,” Crinklewink said, one side of his mouth twitching into a bit of a smile. “Only you three.”

Elsie had been starting to take to Crinklewink. It was easy to see. She kind of leaned forward when he was talking and the little crease between her eyebrows got deeper. The handkerchief trick with Duncan had helped, of course, but there was more to it than that: there was just something about him that made you want to like him.

But still Elsie was cautious. No one said anything for a bit—because we were watching her as she … well, breathed, I suppose. That was all she was doing but Duncan, Crinklewink and I knew she was doing loads more. She was thinking and stuff. Getting ready to say something. And if we knew what was good for us, we’d better be ready to listen (even Crinklewink had already cottoned on to this, it seemed).

“Only us three,” she finally said.

“Only you three,” Crinklewink confirmed.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why, after one whole week of being in town, did you suddenly decide to tell us? Three kids you’ve never met before.”

Crinklewink seemed on the verge of doing that shrugging thing again, but he thought better of it and instead leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the darkening sky. “Because I know, I suppose,” he finally said.

“What do you know?” I asked when Elsie didn’t say anything.

“I know that a woman with purple hair is definitely going to try to kill me seven days from now,” he said. “And I also know that the three of you are going to help me stop her.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Can I ask you a question, Dad?”

“Do you mean, ‘May I ask you a question?’?”

“Don’t start, Dad. I get enough of that from Elsie.”

“That is one clever young lady. You’d do well to pay more attention to her.”

We were sitting in the living room with a repeat of Time Team on the telly and the curtains drawn. Dad was slurping Cuppa Soup through a straw—his cheeks caving in as he struggled with the lumpy bits—and I was filling up with crisp sandwiches because, well, supper had been pretty horrific (some kind of casserole that looked as if it had been sneezed onto the plate). Mam was somewhere out the back, “attending to her domestic chores”, as Dad liked to put it, so it was just us two men.

“May I ask you question, then?” I asked.

“Fire away!” Dad said, waving his hand and almost twanging his straw out of his mug. “Ask your old dad anything! What he doesn’t know, he can find out! What he can’t find out, he can make up!”

He seemed to find this funnier than I did but I chuckled along with him for a minute and then said, “What would you do, Dad, if you thought someone was going to kill you?”

Sucking on his straw, he thought about this (as best he could) and then asked, “You mean like fatally kill me dead, right?”

You see what I mean, right? About him not being … well, you know, not all that bright? I thought about hitting him with some witty reply but it would have been wasted on him. So I just nodded and waited to see what he would say.

“Actually happened to me once,” he said. And I was surprised. The very idea that someone would want to kill my dad … well, it wasn’t exactly scary—even though it probably should have been—because it just seemed totally barmy. I mean, he was just such a pointless bloke, really. What could he ever do to make someone want to kill him? “Nineteen ninety-two, it was, if I recall correctly,” he continued. “And I had been really stupid.” Now that was hard to believe! “The way you can be when you’re young and foolhardy, you know?”

“How had you been really stupid, Dad?” It seemed a reasonable question: I’d seen him be really stupid in loads of different ways—a little detail didn’t seem too much to ask for.

“I’m almost embarrassed to say.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed in front of me, Dad.” I almost added, I know how stupid you are already but decided that probably wouldn’t have been very kind—or sensible.

He gave me this fatherly nod that I think was meant to make me see how proud he was of me or something, and then said, “Well, yes. Very foolish. You see I committed a cardinal sin, our Walter. Something someone in my position should never even have dreamt of doing.”

“What did you do, Dad?” I wished he’d get a flipping move on.

“What?” He slurped on his straw and waited for me to explain the question I’d just asked—which I didn’t know how to explain because it had kind of explained itself when I’d asked it. Or I thought it had, anyway.

“Difficult to believe, I know, young man. But even your old dad can be stupid.”

I didn’t say anything.

“First day it was, you see. And I was all excited about it. I mean, it isn’t every day you get to start a new job at the bicycle recycling plant, now, is it?”

“Bicycle recycling?” I was, as Elsie would have said, incredulous. (Good word, or what?)

“You’ve got it! We recycled cycles in, as our supervisor liked to say, a cyclical manner. Was actually dead good. The old bicycles would be put on this conveyor belt and they would go all the way around the building. The first half, everyone working at the conveyor belt would take the bicycles to pieces and put all the bits into this shoot like thing which would zoom them over to the other side of the room where all those bits would be recycled and the bicycles would return fully recycled at the beginning of a conveyor belt! Genius, I tell you!”

I kept my gob firmly shut. As difficult as it was.

“So, I was all excited, you see. Who wouldn’t be, right? Top-notch job like that. And I made a fatal mistake.”

“What did you do, Dad?” I’d just about forgotten why I’d even asked him in the first place. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I could remember what I’d asked him in the first place.

“Turned up on time! First day! I mean, talk about setting the bar too high!”

I remembered. “And that made someone want to kill you?”

“What? Oh, well, kill me might be exaggerating it just a little bit but I certainly rubbed Frank MacArthur up the wrong way, I’ll tell you that!”

Out in the back kitchen, I could hear Mam clattering pots and humming Firestarter—her favourite tune from the olden days. On the telly, the little bloke out of that old comedy Blackadder was running about and looking into holes like holes were the most exciting thing in the whole wide world. (See what I did there? Hole? Whole? … Never mind.) And right that minute I would have rather been anywhere other than in that living room with Dad. Running around a field with Tony Thingumy or in the back kitchen with Mam drying the pots for her.

“So he didn’t really want to kill you, then?” It had to be asked.

“Who? Frank MacArthur? Heck, no. Nicest man you could ever wish to meet! That first day? Made me feel like the most special fella on the planet! Bent over backwards to make me feel welcome—not literally, of course!”

Once he had finished laughing at this, I shuffled about on the settee a bit, sighed, folded my arms, unfolded my arms, shuffled a bit more, and then said, “Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Your soup is getting cold.”

“Good man!” he said, and went back to his painful-looking sucking.

In my room, I closed the door behind me and turned on the light. It was proper dark outside, now—and inside, for that matter—but the warm glow from the overhead bulb and the posters of jungle, desert and Pampas scenes made me feel right where I was supposed to be. Indoors but outdoors at the same time.

It was a relief to be on my own—away from Dad and his confusing answers that were never really answers. It was my own fault, of course. I should have known better. A conversation with him was like that bicycle recycling plant: everything got taken the bits and then put back together and then taken to bits and … well, you know. Could just go on and on and around and around forever. And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

Thinking about putting my pyjamas on, I walked over to the window. What if Elsie was right? I suddenly asked myself. What if Crinklewink was just another Norman Andrews?

I liked Elsie. Yes, I know—not supposed to admit stuff like that, but I did. She was fun and clever and could crack her knuckles better than anyone I knew. One thing more than anything else about her, though, what kept me being her friend, was that she was dead good at making sure I didn’t mess up too much. Because I could do that. Even when I was trying not to. Especially when I was trying not to. It was like the time we went into town together, even though we weren’t supposed to. We were just, you know, wandering around shops, not buying anything, and I noticed this bloke in Marks & Spencer’s following us at a distance. “You’re trying too hard,” Elsie had said to me. And I’d known exactly what she had meant as soon as she’d said it—because the minute I’d entered the shop I’d felt very … well, like everyone was looking at me, and I was right determined not to look suspicious. Of course, that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? We’ve all done it, right? Tried to blend in and not stick out? Hands in pockets, whistling a merry tune—that kind of thing? Well that’s what I was like. Elsie sorted that out, though. She talked to me. Took my mind off blending in and not sticking out. And pretty soon that store detective, because that’s what he had to be, just disappeared into the crowd. I like to think he was of chasing proper villains but he was more than likely just on his tea break.

So I usually listened to Elsie, even when I pretended not to. It didn’t help today that she had seemed to warm to Crinklewink, though. First there had been the warning and then … well, did she like him or didn’t she?

By the window, I rested my bum against the edge of my desk. I should really have been getting ready for bed—reading my book about the Amazonian rainforests—but I wasn’t tired. Something, Crinklewink, I think, wouldn’t let me go. It was going to happen, I suddenly thought. Just like I’d always known it would. Something. In fact, hadn’t it already?

Down on the street below, on the opposite side of the road, just outside of the reach of the nearest streetlight, something moved. A juddering, stop-go-stop kind of movement. It was enough, though. It made me look.

Moving closer to the window, I cupped my hands around my eyes and tried to figure out what was down there. It was proper dark, now, and … was it just a cat? One of those urban foxes I’d seen mating on Springwatch? No, this was something bigger. Much bigger. Unless I was mistaken (and this time I knew I wasn’t), there was someone down there. A live living human being, as Dad might have said. That juddering, stop-go-stop movement again—only this time it was more of a juddering, stop-go-stop movement that kept right on going kind of movement.

And there she was! Passing under the streetlight. A woman. Dark hair that didn’t look quite right, quite normal, somehow. She moved like she meant it. She wasn’t uncertain or anything, now. And as she walked, she turned and lifted her head, looking up at my window.

I know, I know—sounds like a really depressing blog post, based on the title, doesn’t it? And, I suppose, at another time, the realisation that has recently come to me might indeed have been depressing. However, the truth is, while I have become disenchanted with the whole business of struggling to sell books, it has also been a liberating experience.

It can become something of a treadmill. This isn’t a whinge, of course. I have enjoyed the whole publishing process since the launch of my first novel If I Never. Over the past twelve months or so, however, it has seemed increasingly futile. With the huge growth in independent authorship, the marketplace has become more than crowded—it has become glutted and exhausted and, to my mind, a further expression of vanity publishing at its worst (in many, though not all, cases). To be heard above the promotional hubbub requires something beyond persistence, something I’m not entirely sure I any longer want any part of.

I’ve always known that promotion was a part of the publishing business, naturally. And I have no problem with that. But when it starts to predominate, impact on the writing, and steer one’s creative course … well, something has to be done, right?

So this is how it’s going to be for at least the next twelve months: I’m going to focus almost exclusively on my writing (well, at least as far as my work is concerned; if you’ve been paying attention, you may have spotted that I have other wonderful things going on in my life at the moment—which take precedence over everything else). Promotion will be set completely aside. When my latest project, The Architect, is complete, it will be submitted to mainstream publishers and I will set to work on the next project. More work will be brought out through GWM Publications, but not until 2015. This work will be promoted, naturally, but I will not be spending every last minute on Twitter trying to schmooze people into taking a look at it.

Instead, I’m going to ask my small but faithful band of merry readers to do what they have always been kind enough to do for me and continue spreading the word. Word of mouth is something that I have always acknowledged as the number one promotional method. So, while I get my head down and write the books I hope you will continue to enjoy, please whisper to your friends about me, tell them titbits from my stories, share this blog with them or point them to the free samples on the GWM Publications website … and know that somewhere there is one grateful writer, putting words down, happy in the knowledge that the readers that truly understand what he is trying to do are doing their level best to bring other people on board.

Today, friend and fellow author Jane Adams got my prepublication promo for The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost off to a fine start.

The full article can be read here, but to whet your appetite, here’s a wee snippet:

Lorna is a book about loss and memory and love and redemption – to use an overused and clichéd word. Love really does conquer all, but does so with grace and style and sex and humour and in the end subverts not just the readers’ expectations, but Lorna’s too. I’ll be writing in more depth about Lorna soon – and interviewing the author here, on the blog, just before the book is published. The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost will be published in early October and I think Gary’s many fans will be very happy.

Over recent months, I haven’t really written about current projects in these pages (though I have frequently mentioned what I’m up to on Twitter and Facebook). This has not been deliberate, merely something of an oversight. And, so, I thought today—the summer solstice—might be a good day to sum up just what I’ve been doing during the first half of the year.

Shortly after Christmas saw me editing my latest completed novel, The Juniper Faraday Project. A novel exploring the nature of trust, in the form of what I like to think of as a why-dunnit, Juniper is now going through the whole submission process. Early reactions have been promising but if mainstream publishing isn’t interested in it then I will, of course, publish it through GWM Publications.

While working on this, I was also preparing The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost for publication (October 5) and putting in place prepublication promo—more than I’ve managed with any of my other books so far. Lorna has, I believe, huge potential. It has broad appeal and … well, to date, it’s the novel I am most proud of.

Most recently, however, after finishing a proposal for a TV adaptation of Children of the Resolution(it’s “out there”, at the moment—but it is, admittedly, something of a stab in the dark), I’ve been working on the outline for my next novel, The Architect. The Architect is set to be my first truly large canvas psychological thriller in a good while (the first, I should say, I think I’ll be prepared to publish). A multiple viewpoint third person novel, it looks like being, judging by the outline, as large as it is complex (I think I’ll be lucky to bring it in under six hundred book pages)—something I relish, given that the novels I still love today generally lean towards the epic.

The Architect plays with themes touching on individual identity. Not an entirely new subject to me (I’m sure a few of my blog posts here have touched upon it in one form or another on occasion), and something all my novels touch upon, to a point. But with The Architect, I saw a way of doing something quite different. Resurrecting a couple of characters from one of my unpublished novels (the novel that, actually, secured me representation with an agent … an agent I then, a few months later, had a huge falling out with!), I found that they fit this form perfectly. Danny Lane, cerebral, caring, deeply introspective—a guy with type II spinal muscular atrophy (just like me, fancy that!)—came to life in my imagination in a way that he hadn’t previously, while Anderson Russell, Danny’s oldest friend, care assistant and general factotum balanced Danny in such a way that I knew, I know, that if I write this the way I want it … well, it has the potential to be both highly entertaining and thought-provoking (always my primary aim!)

Yes, I’m excited. There’s nothing I enjoy more than rolling up my sleeves and getting into the nitty-gritty of a fictional world. This one has required more preparation than any of my earlier novels (I’m still tweaking the chapter outlines to get the structure just right) and if the writing progresses the way the outlining has, I know it will be a thoroughly enjoyable process.

You know, it’s very easy to get disillusioned. (And I speak as someone who—all things considered, and in spite of my overwhelmingly cynical and occasionally apparently unforgiving demeanour—takes a lot of disillusioning.) The world we live in is packed to the brim with highly worthy individuals struggling to work their way up whichever particular occupational ladder they find themselves on, through accident of birth or academic qualification. And each and every one of them, I’m quite sure, has encountered numerous superior “types” barely qualified to make the office coffee. (And I’m not talking the kind of fancy coffee that none of us had heard of ten years ago—simple Nescafe instant would be enough of a struggle.)

It’s a problem. In the climate we today inhabit, the world and his brother, sister, bastard nephew and dribbling boss-eyed cousin knows better than we, the people who, like, you know, do this shit. At least, to hear them talk.

And this is especially true in publishing. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t one of those bridge burning moments. I’m not, truth be known, all that convinced I have any bridges left to burn in this regard. I do, however, aspire to have such bridges. I, like many other authors, yearn for the day when I can quietly sip my Laphroaig knowing that I have a nice three book deal with one of the big boys. But, whatever the outcome, certain things need to be said—certain truths need to be explored. So I thought … you know … why the fuck not?

I’m fallible. (That blindsided you, didn’t it? I know … I know—I kind of caught myself off guard with that one, but it’s true … no, really.) I’ve spent something like twenty-seven years developing my novel-writing ability, and have been writing far longer than that. From the age of twenty I’ve written more novels than I care to count (though I estimate it as somewhere in the region of twenty-five, with abandoned projects and screenplays on the side). I started off getting comments from agents that made it very clear I didn’t have the slightest idea of what writing a novel entailed—but within three or four novels I was receiving rejections that included phrases such as “well-written” and “challenging”. It became very clear very early on that this was not a mystical process but, rather, a learning process. And I learned, because of my love of fiction, very quickly. Nonetheless, I’ve never considered myself a writer working in isolation—someone, even now, who has perfected his art. It’s a perpetual process that is continually in need of input.

But this input has to come from the right people—and, increasingly, I find my vast experience (and as fallible as I am, I’m not quite stupid enough to deny my own hard-earned credentials) completely disregarded, often by people fresh out of Uni with very little understanding of the world I grew up in. Now, I know some of you may already be balking at this, but it is a very real problem: I’m coming up to 47 and, while I would certainly not suggest that people half my age could never begin to grasp the issues I prefer to address (they are, after all, often exceedingly universal), it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the weighting of the subject matter, the way it is presented, is in many regards not always as the industry first-contacts these days would prefer.

Now, I’m very aware that this may sound like one of those bitching author posts. “Oh, he’s been rejected again.” But this is how it is: I’ve been rejected by, and in one or two instances, briefly worked with (admittedly in the loosest possible sense), people who have worked with authors ranging from Updike to Fleming. I’ve also had the good fortune to be surrounded by very talented authors for decades. Consequently, I’m very aware of my failings as an author. I am also pretty well acquainted with my strengths—and, increasingly, I find that the very things I value in my own writing and in the writing of others are consistently and casually devalued by those I encounter in the industry. (I think it’s also extremely important to stress at this point that readers I speak to also find this as baffling and frustrating as I.)

That there is a focus on profit, of course, goes without saying. And quite understandably. Serious fiction is, quite often, unprofitable. Even well-written genre fiction, if it isn’t by an established name, can be a tough sell. And of course those in the industry are going to focus on the more marketable titles (the clue is in the word “industry”). But does this then mean that those rejecting 21st-century authors are presenting a fair assessment of the quality of the work being submitted?

Well, of course, in many instances it does. That dross is written today is as true as it ever was—more so, if anything, given that since the advent of word processing software etc all those years ago just about everyone is writing a novel. But it’s equally true that there is much fiction being written that will never fit the actually rather limited requirements of mainstream publishing today. I could bang on about Proust until I’m blue in the face, and once again extol the virtues of the new publishing paradigm represented by micro publishing, indie publishing, self publishing et cetera. But, instead, let me just state it very clearly: much incredible fiction is today being written that mainstream publishing will never touch and the new publishing paradigm is only rarely a solution to this problem.

A depressing conclusion, I know—and there are, it has to be said, countless exceptions (though these still only make up an exceedingly small minority). Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly obvious that 21st-century authors are faced with considerable obstacles and numerous decisions. At the forefront of all this, however, is one question that has predominated all my writing “life”: why do you write?

If your primary consideration is one of profit, then I would suggest you try some other occupation. Using Amazon Kindle to push free copies of your work just might generate some interest—but, in my experience, this will lead to little more than Kindle number-lovers adding you to their endless list of freely-acquired Kindle books, Kindle books that they might get round to reading eventually. That there is the potential to generate profit from this is unquestionable; it is, however, statistically unlikely, given the sheer numbers involved and the increasingly devalued appreciation of quality. I’m not saying don’t give work away; I’m just saying be selective.

But should we, as authors, be thinking purely in terms of profit? Obviously, no. While we do have to have an awareness of our value as authors, it seems pretty basic to me that this should not be, can not be, the driving factor: if you do not love what you are doing for the sake of it, then shame on you. … And this is where I find myself retracing my thematic footsteps to my earlier comments regarding “input”: if you’ve reached the point where, like many of us, you’ve realised that many in the industry have a very different focus, are not, in some instances, even aware of the possibility of other focuses … does this not actually present a considerable opportunity? Put the numbers to one side. Forget, for a moment, that pressure to sell—and, instead, concentrate on writing what you want to write. In the past I’ve read criticism of my work—The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, for example, being described as “disturbing”—and been baffled by the responses (if the aforementioned novel were not “disturbing”, to make my point, there would either be something wrong with me as a writer or something wrong with the reader). The vast majority “get” this. That there are points worthy of discussion, readers disagreeing on certain story elements, is something else entirely: such a basic lack of understanding of what fiction aims to accomplish, an at times overwhelming disregard for the fact that sometimes fiction is intended to annoy, disturb, upset, disgust, challenge, confuse and demand reveals that we, as authors, have to grasp that a substantial part of what we do is learning who to trust.

It’s important that we are open to feedback, that we understand the value of criticism. It is, however, equally important that we, once we have paid our dues, are aware of our own strengths, and our individual experiences. We have to learn to value our own abilities, and feel less reticent about questioning the opinions of those who have never in their lives written a novel (and, in many cases, haven’t read anywhere near the number of novels we ourselves have).

That some may not enjoy what I write is inevitable and natural. I’d be worried if this were not the case (I guess). But whatever particular individual’s view of my work, I have now reached the point where I can quite confidently state that there is absolutely nothing accidental about it (the occasional typo aside!). I know what I’m doing; if a particular reader does not take from it what I had hoped, then, just maybe, that isn’t my failing.

My job, as I see it, and whatever the requirements of 21st-century mainstream publishing, is to demand something of my reader. Blessedly, the majority seem to be up to the task (though, alas, they are not always those at the forefront of the “industry”).

As some of you will already know, my next novel,The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, is due for publication on October 5 this year. Determined to prepare well in advance with this one, I’m ensuring that review copies go out a good six months before publication date.

It’s therefore my pleasure to announce that a limited number of review copies are now available—as Kindle editions or paperbacks (though I’m afraid I cannot make paperback editions available to overseas reviewers … unless you have a huge following, in which case I might make an exception). If you have a reasonable number of readers and might be interested, please check here from further details and if you still feel it might be something you’d like to review, contact me either here or via the above-mentioned website.

Please bear in mind that only a limited number of review copies are available and that well-established blogs will usually take precedence over new sites. This, however, should not put you off contacting me: if your blog is well-written, interesting and obviously going to attract more readers in the future—who knows? Drop me a line and we’ll discuss it.

Also, around the publication date I will be doing a blog tour. If you would be interested in hosting me … well, ladies and gents, you know what to do!

I’m happy to reveal the cover for my next novel, The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost—once again designed by the extremely talented Gudrun Jobst. As those of you on Facebook who were lucky enough to see early versions may notice, we have moved away from the blue theme and opted for a warmer and much more appropriate sepia tone. Hope you like it as much as I do! (Click on images to magnify.)

PLEASE NOTE: in response to all the enquiries, publication of Lorna is pencilled in for early October. Keep dropping by for further updates and, coming soon, FREE sample chapters.